World of Warships – State of Play

It’s been a rough old week on the high seas, and here’s why. Links down below, including to iChases’ infamous “Flying Shimakaze” video and a new video he just posted called “Why Your AA Sucks”, both well worth a watch.

All music licensed from www.epidemicsound.com and www.machinimasound.com

90 Comments:

TheBaralinChannel either you didn’t understand what I meant, or you did not want to understand what I meant. If you loose all your squadrons that fast you are doing something wrong, the same way you are doing somethig wrong when your ship is sunk after 5minutes. A Yamato at 10KHP can do damage, A carrier who lost 85%of his planes can do damage and Anti-Air even gets less the longer the battle takes. What the new changes will be is all speculation and we don’t know any stats.

​+N1c3s To quote MattttChris on the NA Forums: “The fastest way to seem like you know nothing about the game is saying CVs have unlimited planes. The Midway used to have 116 planes

Currently with all the skills to have the most planes with fastest reload you can have 20 Attack planes on deck and over the course of 20min you can reload 20 for a total of 40 attack planes 19 torp planes on deck and over the course of 20min you can reload 13 for a total of 31 torp planes 20 DB planes on deck and over the course of 20min you can reload 17 for a total of 37 DB

Add that all up and you get 108 vs the previous 116. And torps do a ton less damage, map control with spotting has been removed, and generally AA has been buffed.

This clearly hasnt been tested … and Wargaming should revert this patch and TEST IT SOME MORE before they take a serious dip in players … and they need to LISTEN TO THE FEEDBACK … even if it says “this is garbage”!

Oh you sweet summer child. This has been tested. They knew about this. They kept it in just so they could say “See? The rework didn’t kill CV Damage ouput” followed by “Oh yes, you’re right, we’ll improve balancing”. Careful planning to both prevent complaining about weak CVs, pull players to the OP CVs so CVs don’t go extinct, and to look like good devs who listen to the players. All in one go.

+Dafydd Flower Goes hand in hand with the Marine “PFC Test”. “If you want to find out exactly all the ways a new piece of gear can be broken, lost, misused, and generally defiled in ways not thought possible, let the PFC’s have it for a few months.”

+Dafydd Flower It’s also not right to throw the old system away when you know damn well the new system is garbage. It’s also not right to LIE about the feedback you’re getting on the new (and unworkable) system and claim everyone’s in favor when the facts clearly say otherwise. And it sure as hell is not right to release a system where you can outperform “skilled” play by effectively THROWING SKILL OUT THE WINDOW.

Don’t try to claim that this crap is in any way an improvement over RTS carriers, because you know damn well that’s a lie.

Thing is these problems where flagged before the rework went live. The Fact abuse, that AA wasn’t strong enough, the stealth torping! All these problems where brought to attention before the rework went live yet wargaming went ahead with it anyway. Geez these devs have their heads stuck so far up their own ass it’s ridiculous.

They were flagged but there wasn’t enough information to PROVE it was an issue, a few hundred people saying something is just noise, a few thousand people saying something with data to back it up is proof.

​+asaeampan So, you are basically saying, that the Test Server – exactly the place these issues were discovered – is rubbish and should be shut down, so upcoming patches can no longer be tested by a larger number of players. If you don’t listen to CC, supertesters and the people on the test server, why should you listen to a couple more of your customers?

It,s not only the CV reworks but it,s also eliminate the role of DD,s , getting points with their spotting but now do all the plains that spotting for them. Yesterday i have try to play the game with the BB Musashi and within 5 minutes i was down to the bottom of the sea because a vc was spaming his torp, i not like this way of playing this game it,s have nothing to do with skills anymore. Also 6 CV,s in one game thats overkill.

But what will be left from the entire gameplay when CV,s airplanes are able to fly with a speed of 200 Knts to a enemy zone , drop torps and press the F key and directly fly with the whole squadron again direction the enemy zone and while his old torps still in the water he drops a new torp attack? What is the fun in the game for all players when you are in a battle like https://youtu.be/R5bBhKBfmIk ?

The game is broken and the hotfix will do very little to address the core game mechanics problems introduced with 0.8.0. Remember when this game was first announced 4 years ago as “World of Battleships”? New working title is “World of Carriers & Battleships”. There is little viability for cruisers, and no viability for DDs. Boycott the game – don’t log in and don’t purchase anything from the premium shop. The only thing Wargaming will truly listen to is numbers – so don’t give them log-in numbers and don’t finance anything further until they fully address the problems.

The issue with Destroyers is not that they are bad. Up to Tier 6 they work like a charm. But the moment you start going up and having radar ( and now so many ships carry radar ). Even before radar it was hard to even stealth fire a destroyer on the higher tiers, because of the detection ranges. Radar simply made it even worse.

And yes, Cruisers have always been a issue. They lack the firepower to hit BBs hard ( unless it are spam cruisers with ultra fast reloads ) and they lost their usefulness in AA roles because less and less people played Aircraft carriers. And even then most people did not even stick to their own BB or Aircraft carriers for AA protection duty. Hell, a lot of times a AC or BB did not even acknowledge when a AA specs Cruiser stuck on him to provide protection.

On the lower tiers i find the balance better but the moment you start going into the higher tiers, overpowered mechanics start to cripple the gameplay for several types of ships. And do not get me started on premium lower tier ships and when you own them, how fast they become useless as new game mechanics and up tiering makes your ship a damage hose.

Frankly, … we need a system like a competitor, where you can reinforce with new ships if your ship is lower tier and it gets destroyed. Like a L8 BB is 20 points, your L6 CS is 10 points ( uptiered and lower class ), allowing you to bring in two CS. Anyway, just a idea …

I always found that bringing in a light or medium armored ship in a higher level tier, when that ship is not a premium with some special ability to offset its weaker level, is like trowing game time away for nothing.

SFC Gunny Well, one thing is for sure: I ain’t comin’ back to WoWS, probably ever. First Tanks, now Ships. Thank goodness that the equipment system overhaul in WoWP actually left all classes playable and didn’t ruin all but one class. It was a major mistake on WG’s part, pretty much everyone who has ever played WoWP thinks so, but at the very least it didn’t break the game like 0.8.0 clearly has for WOWS.

+owatahfuhlyem I might be stupid. But wasn’t this a F2P game? So yeah they might lose out for a while. But as a player with limited time. I won’t support a game which is clearly unplayable. Love my planes (AC 7) but this is World of Warships and to cater to a niche part of the game, they present me 0.8.0, uhm no thanks.

I have stopped playing random at high tiers because of this – ranked with only 6 other players I am playing as it is a more satisfying…. aircraft carriers are less popular in that format for which I am grateful – personally I think this could break the game. I stopped playing World of Tanks so much because of the toxic atmosphere with other players – this aircraft issue might destroy the game we generally older players play mainly because it is more tactical and strategic and less reliant on super quick reflexes as World of Tanks….

” manouvering to avoid the torpedoes ” hah i can tell you have not been a victim of a hakuryu jingles , because if you have , then you would know that the haku torpedos are NOT spotted untill they are LITERALY in your face , they have better concelemnet than deep water torpedoes of Yueyang .

Lol I think there needs to be balanced but if you are claiming stealth torpedoes just popped up with no warning, then you are not paying attention. If you see torpedoes planes coming towards you always assume they launched and are on thier way. Yes they can launched stealthed, but the planes close so fast you will see them before the torps get in range

You can turn in to the planes. The real issue is that Haku can cross drop any battleship with ease, and there is no avoiding a cross drop. All you can do to buy just a bit more time is to sail close to islands and eliminate some angles of attack.

I am a destroyer player. I specialised on playing japanese dd, capping, smoke support, sneak attacks with short range fast torps. I loved to play Shimakaze with the fastest torp and speed boost. 6.4 km range, but 81 knot speed. Giving radar to every second ship was bad enough, but this FPS carrier play, unlimited, invincible planes, and rocket shooters made my DDs useless and unplayable. I dont mind if something is difficult. But being useless is no fun. And I play for fun. When I am killed by carrier before I can even detect a single enemy ship that is anti-fun. Only option: camping beside AA cruisers. Terrible…

+JGSR i know that…i just dont think its very good as he needs to get REALLY close to be able to use his torps at all…thats deep inside radar range, and even that, if the enemy is going away, he cant hit anything with stealth torps. 8km is probably the bare minimum of effective torping at high tiers…12 is ideal, 10 is decent.

+cobrazax I play Kamikaze and Shimakaze. For “serious” play I use the 12km torps, for fun the 8km ones… both with acceleration. The 500 meter window is enough with some skill and luck. 15 torpedo, 81 knots, fired from 6 km. Deadly most of the time. When I screw up, I die… When I do it right, they die… Both are a lot of fun.

+meleardil only works if no radar is in the area, no DDs in the area, hell…even some sonar can spot u at that range… also u need enemies to get closer to u or at least be broadside. if any of those dont match…its a fail. 12km remove all of those and do more dmg

Hi Cobrax, I’m a DD player most often, and I like my Russian DD’s but at all the levels I play at I am lucky to have 4km range on torps so its smoke screen/island surprises or charge of the light brigade…. Life’s a charm when I get an 8+ Km Torp on my other DD’s. Its just a personal choice thing I guess. Cheers, enjoy your gaming!

+Karlchen Karolinger possible balancing options for the OLD CVs can be longer torp arming distance to give targets more time to avoid, and make it harder to devastate targets. AA increasing over time to prevent perma DD spotting. limiting spotting data to 1-2 squads at a time, with a delay switch with a similar concept to current AA sector switching. this will prevent total map spotting at all times, making u have to focus on a few squads for spotting info at a time. thats just a concept idea…other ideas can work too.

I play DDs alot, still do. And aircraft are the lest of my worries. Just have to pay attention to incoming aircraft and when you see them incoming, just go into a tight circle. It works. My Z-52 has a AA of 49 and has never been sunk by planes.

+sgg if they just added the replenish mechanic to prevent full de-planning so you had a CV sitting there with nothing to do it probably would have worked fine an people would have stuck with the shitty CVs. I do actually like the new game play but agree the counter-play isn’t quite there yet. Particularly with cruisers…hopefully cruiser AA recovers where it needs to be.

want to balance CV play? go back to the old gameplay and increase the AA effectiveness. Slightly increase the rewards to players for good CV play, and done. Instead, lets turn it into a console WOWs blitz arcade game.

8.0 is and was a giant fluster cluck……. They really screwed up game play, and while I realize they needed more game play to understand the issue, there were ways to avoid ruining the game for everyone as they attempt to actually manage this change.

A) Offer real incentives for PTS play that compensate for paid time on the live server. PTSers should get at least one Premium day for every “x” minutes played on the PTS. B) Increase queue time on the PTS to a max of 3 minutes… instead of 30 seconds. This was a joke and resulted in no progress in play testing. It was a waste of time that seemed to be intentional. C) Roll out the new CV’s over weeks. Remove all current CVs and put only T4 back in play – work out the issues and then after it seems stable, apply changes to T6 and add those and repeat. Changes to upper tier AA will be irrelevant, ,as there will be no upper tier CVs initially. D ..and finally…. listen to the user base when they tell you that things are not working.

TLDW : Just another patch that supports the lowest common denominator. With the older CV playstyle, i had respect for them even though i felt irritated when my ship got nuked, because it took skill to use the RTS system. This?….well the results speak for themselves. In the end it’s like War of the Worlds, with surface ships as the humans and the smug, pretentious pricks who support this patch as “balanced and fair” and cry about how the old system was too difficult for them as the CV’s.

I would like to believe that WG can fix this, but i wouldn’t hold my breath. Business is business after all, and if thousands of complete potato’s with daddy’s credit card love this patch, than in the end, nothing really matters to them.

Helping Ichase test it, and speaking with a few people the problem with AA is that you need a full AA setup with DFAA up to do reasonable damage with just passive DPS to enemy planes, however thats all divided amongst each plane IE each plane is taking more damage the less of them there are. So when a Mino/Worcester/DM is doing 1880 damage (Rough estimate of its midrange) its being divided between 12 seperate planes, not including the -10% of that damage because of Aircraft Armor. Then CE for +150 HP more, it takes a good 13 seconds of being in the midrange AA of any of these ships to have a plane get shot down, problem is, you just drop and F key away. This is also not taking into consideration the extreme speed of tier 10 planes, my Midway (not haku havent tested too much of her) could line up from 9km out, start the drop, be through the long, and mid, and short AA to do a point blank drop in less than 10 seconds. And people wonder why AA doesnt work at higher tiers but low tiers its VERY good at tearing planes a new one.

@Inawana Industries hopefully I can articulate my answers properly. the Cleveland used to be a tier 6 cruiser, it was first ship that had some serious AA, bristling as you said. its now a tier 8 ship. if we were going for realism only, then yes, an iowa would have more AA potential just due to shear numbers of guns but neither would be a slouch either. however, WG has never stuck very close to realism. Their model is an arcade game and therefore balance with playstyle variety is god. not all CVs have the same tier planes as the ship itself. so to explain what I meant by power groups, I was inferring that the ships have their AA balanced into groups, say 1-5. low tier ships have almost no AA so they would be group 1. group 1 would have a set DPM for the AA firepower. high tier ships that have good AA would be group 4 by default. make the captain skill that increases AA raise the ship AA by one group level. by making the AA firepower even and more consistent across the game, they can adjust only the aircraft HP and firepower to rebalance as needed. the issue was that CVs were too strong in the hands of a skilled player, and your team was screwed if your CV player didn’t know what he was doing while the other teams did. they have moved to lower the skill cap and now have to rebalance the AA and tweak other stuff. but the issue I have is that each ship damned near has its own AA rating, so you do not have a baseline to measure from when you adjust aircraft. realistic? yes. good for the game? IMO, no, too hard to balance. personally, I think one CV line should be about time consuming but hard hitting strikes and the other should be about fast light rapid attacks that slowly eat away at the enemy team.

+Nicodemus lol so a tier8 bb with aa as characteristic against a tier6 cv is a sign of bad design? sorry you are telling bullshit. visible by that you imply that nc is more aa range the air spotting range

This^2. I’m back to grinding low tiers again because, let’s be honest, low tier CVs are cannon fodder for your average AA… while tier 10 is totally unplayable right now, no fun. And yes a point that few have mentioned in videos : tier 10 planes are waaaaaaaaaay too fast. You can cover the biggest maps in no time. The teams are spotted within 30 sec of the start. Everyone knows what the other team’s doing. DDs can’t forward spot and to add insult to the ignominious amount of injury planes can have RPF as a straight-line homing signal “SHIP IS HERE” big fat neon sign.

How WG released the patch in this shape and form is totally beyond me. I’m having cold sweats stinking of World of Tanks seeing this.

+XxxQCxxX All CC’s are under a firm Non-Disclosure ban prior to actual release, or real public testing… you should know that by now. Also…don’t forget: Dev’s play the way they “think the game will be played”. Not the way a Loophole searching min/max unicum plays to win every game using every tactic and mechanic at their disposal. I’m certain there are hundreds of products out there in the world that were created with the best of intentions for a particular use…. but some clever bugger finds a corrupt exploit to manipulate the item and poof. now it’s ruined for public use.

I’m both very thankful and very upset with you iChase for releasing that video. While it made the point that needed to be made, it also made tier 10 unplayable as more players adopted the techniques. I earned a bunch of premium time that I can’t take advantage of because it just isn’t worth the pain. XD

Fortunately, by watching this video, I have come to realize that Jingles and others have spread the misery far and wide, so there’s that. The hotfix can’t come fast enough.